Michelle Remembers

Michelle Remembers is a book published in 1980 co-written by Canadian psychiatrist Dr Lawrence Pazder and his psychiatric patient (and eventual wife) Michelle Smith. A best-seller, Michelle Remembers was the first book written on the subject of satanic ritual abuse and is an important part of the controversies beginning in the 1980s regarding satanic ritual abuse and repressed memory. The book has been discredited by several investigations which found no corroboration of the book's events, while others have pointed out that the events described in the book were extremely unlikely, if not impossible.

Contents

Background

Michelle Remembers chronicles Pazder's therapy in the late 1970s with his long-time patient Smith.[1] In 1973 Pazder first started treating Smith at his private psychiatric practice in Victoria, British Columbia.[2][3] In 1976 when Pazder was treating Smith for depression (related to her having had a miscarriage), Smith confided she felt that she had something important to tell him, but could not remember what it was.[3] Shortly thereafter, Pazder and Smith had a session where Smith screamed for twenty-five minutes non-stop and eventually started speaking in the voice of a five year old.[2] Over the next fourteen months Pazder spent over 600 hours using hypnosis to help Smith recover alleged memories of satanic ritual abuse that occurred when she was five in 1954 and 1955 at the hands of her mother (Virginia Proby) and others, all of whom Smith said were members of a "Sataniccult" in Victoria.[2][3]

Summary

The book documents Smith's memory of events recovered during therapy, documenting the many satanic rituals she was forced to attend (Pazder stated that Smith was abused by "the Church of Satan," which he states is a worldwide organization predating the Christian church). The first ritual attended by Smith took place in 1954 when she was five years old and the final ritual documented in the book was an eighty-one day ritual in 1955 that summoned the devil himself and involved the intervention of Jesus, the Virgin Mary and Michael the Archangel, who removed the scars received by Smith throughout the year of abuse and removed memories of the events 'until the time was right'. During the rites, Smith was allegedly tortured, locked in cages, sexually assaulted, forced to take part in various rituals, witnessed several murders and was rubbed with the blood and body parts of various killed babies and adults.

After Smith had recovered her memories, she and Pazder consulted with various church authorities, eventually travelling to the Vatican.

Witchcraft in City

An appendix reprints the article "'Witchcraft in City' Claim" by Paul Jeune. An evangelist named Len Olsen claimed on televangelist David Mainse's talk show 100 Huntley Street that he and his wife were nearly sacrificed in a satanic ritual by Mark Fedoruk, also known as Lion Serpent Sun. Sun sued for defamation, and in court it was revealed that Olsen had been delusional apparently due to drug use and guilt; Sun was awarded $10,000 and an appeal was denied. The lawsuit and result were not reported in Michelle Remembers, only the original false allegations.[4][5]

Publication history

Michelle Remembers was first publicized with articles in People Weekly and the National Enquirer.[6] During 1980, Pazder and Smith toured the United States to promote the book.[2] Ultimately a publishing success, the book earned Pazder and Smith a $100,000 hard-cover advance, $242,000 for paperback rights, royalties, and a potential movie deal.[2][6]

Accuracy questions

Pazder is a credentialed psychiatrist and fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada, and the book states that its source material (therapy tapes) were scrutinized. Despite this, questions about the accuracy of the allegations in Michelle Remembers were raised shortly after the book was published. Soon after the book’s publication, Pazder was forced to withdraw his assertion that it was the Church of Satan that had abused Smith when Anton LaVey (who founded the Church of Satan in 1966) threatened to sue for libel.[6] In a October 27, 1980 article in Maclean's magazine,[2] reporter Paul Grescoe interviewed Smith's father, Jack Proby, who denied the allegations against Smith's mother, Virginia (who died in 1964), and claimed he could refute all the allegations in the book. Grescoe also interviewed the mother of a childhood friend of Smith who described Smith’s mother as a kind and charming woman. He also noted that the book failed to make any mention of Smith's two sisters, Charyl (younger) and Tertia (older) and that Pazder and Smith (both Catholics) had divorced their spouses and married each other.

The Grescoe article did not garner much attention and the allegations in Michelle Remembers were still considered to be true at this point in time. As a result, Pazder was considered to be an expert in the area of satanic ritual abuse. With the sudden emergence of satanic ritual abuse cases in the 1980s (likely due in part to the publication of Michelle Remembers[7]) Pazder's expertise was called upon. In 1984, Pazder acted as a consultant in the McMartin preschool trial which featured allegations of satanic ritual abuse.[7] Pazder also appeared on the first major news report on Satanism (broadcast on May 16, 1985), by ABC’s 20/20.[8] Pazder was part of the Cult Crime Impact Network and lectured to police agencies about satanic ritual abuse during the late 1980s. By 1987 Pazder reported that he was spending a third of his time consulting on satanic ritual abuse cases.[7] By September 1990, Pazder had been consulted "in more than 1,000 'ritual abuse' cases".[9] With people suddenly being prosecuted for satanic ritual abuse, prosecutors used the book as a guide when preparing cases against alleged Satanists.[10]

Criticism and debunking

By 1990, an article in the Mail on Sunday exposed further inconsistencies in Smith’s allegations.[9] The Mail on Sunday conducted a two week investigation into the claims made in Michelle Remembers and found that other than Pazder and Smith, the people they interviewed described the events in Michelle Remembers as "the hysterical ravings of an uncontrolled imagination". In an interview with Jack Proby, Proby cited (as an example) "three specific points where … Michelle lied" in Michelle Remembers. Proby indicated that although he decided not to sue, he did file a Notice of Intent to sue against the book's publisher should they go beyond the literary contract thereby preventing the book from being made into a movie. The Mail on Sunday also interviewed the Smith’s childhood family doctor: "I believe it was … an over-active imagination."; former neighbors of the Probys: "I dismissed the book as crazy. The mother was a nice, gracious lady. A little girl could not have been tortured without someone hearing."; a former childhood friend of Smith: "Virginia was like a second mother to me. I certainly never had a bad feeling about her."; and her ex-husband: "Not once during their marriage or the birth of their daughter did Michelle ever mention her experience".

The Mail on Sunday reported that the local Catholicchurch and Bishop Remi De Roo were also attempting to distance themselves from the claims in Michelle Remembers: "He [De Roo] wants to distance himself from these people. More than ten years ago he asked the couple to provide him with details, but they never supplied all the information he required." The Mail on Sunday also reported the Royal Canadian Mounted Police stated that there had never been a single prosecution in Victoria for satanic practices. During the interview, Pazder was questioned about the truth of the claims in the book:

“

[The Mail on Sunday] asked Dr Pazder: "Does it matter if it was true, or is the fact that Michelle believed it happened to her the most important thing?"

He replied: "Yes, that's right. It is a real experience. If you talk to Michelle today, she will say, 'That's what I remember.' We still leave the question open. For her it was very real. Every case I hear I have skepticism. You have to complete a long course of therapy before you can come to conclusions. We are all eager to prove or disprove what happened, but in the end it doesn't matter."[9]

”

A 1995 book found further inconsistencies in Smith’s allegations; the authors found no newspaper record of the car crash that the book describes in the time frame described despite the fact that the local newspaper reported on all vehicle accidents at the time. Former neighbours, teachers and friends were interviewed and yearbooks from Smith’s elementary school were reviewed and found no indication of Smith being absent from school or missing for lengthy periods of time, including the alleged eighty-one-day non-stop ceremony. Ultimately the book's authors were unable to find anyone who knew Smith in the 1950s who could corroborate any of the details in her allegations.[7]

A 2002 article by Kerr Cuhulain[11] not only explored the inconsistencies in Smith’s allegations, but also the unlikely nature of her allegations. Among other things, Cuhulain noted that it seemed unlikely that a sophisticated cult that had secretly existed for generations could be outwitted by a five year old; that the cult could hold rituals in the Ross Bay Cemetery unnoticed given that Smith claimed she was screaming and given that the Ross Bay Cemetery is surrounded on three sides by residential neighborhoods; that an eighty-one-day non-stop ceremony involving hundreds of participants and a massive round room could have gone on in Victoria unnoticed; and that none of Smith’s tormentors (other than her mother) have ever been identified especially given that some of them had cut off one of their middle fingers at the Black Mass. Like other authors,[3][6][7] Cuhulain also noted that many of Smith's recovered memories appear to have reflected elements in popular culture at the time (e.g.: the movie The Exorcist) and Pazder's own religious beliefs and experiences from when he was living and working in Africa in the early 1960s. Finally Cuhulain hypothesizes that Smith's motivation for making the allegations may have come from her desire to spend time with Pazder; though both were initially married to other people, they divorced their spouses and re-married each other after the publication of the book.[11]

James R. Lewis, in The Oxford Handbook of New Religious Movements, wrote that Michelle Remembers "must be treated with great skepticism, not least because literally all the charges involved seem drawn from accounts of West African secret societies from the 1950s, imported to Canada."[12] Nichol Spanos has pointed out in addition to the lack of corroboration of Smith's memories, "skepticism appears warranted by the fact that some of these "memories" involve Michelle's encounters with supernatural beings." Spanos also mentions that Smith's father and unmentioned two siblings contradict the allegations made by Smith, as well as Pazder's time in West Africa during a time when there was widespread concern over secret, blood-drinking, cannibalistic cults.[13]

Despite the lack of evidence and inconsistencies surrounding the allegations made in Michelle Remembers, there are still people who believe that Smith’s claims of abuse are the literal truth and that there is a vast, yet secretive worldwide conspiracy of intergenerational satanic worshipers abusing and murdering children and adults.[3]

The book's contents have been unsubstantiated by any evidence beyond Smith's testimony. Despite this, the book inspired copy-cat accusations throughout the world,[3][14][15] against in many cases members of the Church of Satan, non-satanic occultists, and others with no connection to the occult.[16]